Software

Question

Exchange server 2000

Ok. I am a network administrator in a company. We are running a Windows server 2000 with Exchange server 2000. After 2 days of unplugging the network cable from the mail server we are having the current problem: we cannot recieve ANY emails at all.Some clues to our current state are:We can send emails through ethernet (lan) and outside LAN. Internet and LAN connection is working as intended.We can send email to any registered account in our domain from an outter source. Hotmail yahoo etc etc.We do not use any mail connections with our ISP whatsoever, an email is sent directly to our domain and gets delivered through our exchange server.although in LAN the specified server looks fine, somebody out of the local domain cannot ping our server's static ip address.Our ISP reports that the registered mail ip is correct.When someone tries to send an email to us no error messages occur, the mail is sent.The Exchange server properties and SMTP look just fine, and they are the ones we ve been successfully using the past 2 years nothing changed.using the tools provided at mxtoolbox.com, entering my domain's address it returns my exchange mail server which is mail.convexdesign.gr preference=0 TTL=86400When I try to run a diagnostic lookup (SMTP Diagnostics) it returns 2 kinds of errors:1)A connection attempt failed because the connected party didnot properly respond after a period of time, or connected host has failed to respond.2)A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable network.any help would be greately appreciated.

Gateway

If your exchange server is inside your firewall then your gateway (router/firewall) is forwarding tcp 25 to the internal IP. IF you aren't receiving messages, you need to verify (usually via logs) that mail is reaching your public IP and then rightly forwarding those SMTP requests to your Exchange Server. Your friend is telling you to make sure your public facing equipment is receiving those addresses. I would listen to your friend ;-)

If you aren't even getting mail to your router (or your public static) then you need to verify that your MX records (from your DNS provider) are correct and are associated with the correct IP.

Port 25

Gateway - problem solved

Ok, problem solved.Someone else from my TechTeam connected to the Gateway (=our router) and banned an email spam ip address that he found through the exchange service manager under the SMTP Queries and THAT action blocked our incoming emails. Was that possible? SMTP works wonders now.

Good find

That is interesting, I'm glad you got to the bottom of it. I wonder if they set SMTP to only allow incoming from a whitelist, instead of the blacklisting they were attempting. Sounds like you might need some change management in place ;-) Glad it's working for you now.

Similar problem again

Ok after some days of running again we have the same thing:Under SMTP Virtual Server Queues there is a yahoo.com.tw Queue with thousands of mails waiting to be delivered, prolly spams.I would really like to know if there was a way to prevent all that spam without a 3rd party software involved. I tried to change my connection properties under Default SMTP Virtual Server - properties - connection , and i prohibited access to the specified IP BUT THEY KEEP COMING. I also noticed that when I Denied access to that ip, another hundred of Queues started from something like: msa32.hinet.com ms77.hinet.com ms45.hinet.com etc etc... enumerating some msgs from a random hinet.com queue i noticed that the recipients list was full of @yahoo.com.tw... Some of all those msgs are frozen and some of them have a failure delivery range of 10 ro 80 tries....Checking a whois output hinet.com is an ISP provider at TW.Could you please help me to avoid all that spam once and for all please ?! How can i block them without blocking usefull mails too ? if i deny access to hinet.com it will reject even good mails from coming to our server too.... But the Queues like the msa32.hinet.com msa57 msa72 etc etc seem like there are several hosts sending all these who just connect to their isp... I dont want to ban whole hinet.com cause we do get EXPECTED emails from japan taiwan china. But I cant figure out what that is.

NDR

It sounds like to me you are seeing NDR (Non Delivery Reports) that are being queued in your outbound message queue. So for example, if someone is sending to your domain, your server considers it spam and effectively sends a "Bounce" or NDR e-mail to the original sender saying the message was not delivered. The option to turn that off would be in System Manager Global Settings > Internet Message Formats > Rt Click Default > Properties > Advanced tab and 'Allow non-delivery reports' checkbox. Do you have that checked?

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